Page 15 of Alchemised
She lurched up, but the drug had burned itself out of her blood and her muscles were cramping, contracting as though pulled taut. She tried to straighten, but the instant her feet touched the ground, her legs collapsed under her.
She slumped to the floor.
Run, a voice kept telling her. But she couldn’t; her arms and legs couldn’t hold her. In the absence of any physical ability, her thoughts turned inwards.
Had she really forgotten something?
Perhaps the Eternal Flame was not gone but remained as a hidden ember, waiting until the time was right. The possibility sparked a glimmer of hope. But how had she been made to forget?
Transference. Animancy.
Both words were unfamiliar.
She turned them over in her mind. Trying to contextualise the comments that had been made. Souls and minds and occupying the mental landscape of another person to transmute them from within. And the Eternal Flame had discovered this?
Surely not. Souls were considered inviolable among those of faith. The Eternal Flame considered even the physical alterations of vivimancy and necromancy a risk to an immortal soul.
Alteration of a mind, the transference of a soul: Surely that would be seen as infinitely worse.
Yet Shiseo claimed that the Eternal Flame had developed a way to perform this animancy-transference process. Something that Morrough, who’d unlocked the secrets of immortality, had not discovered.
Who was Elain Boyle? Helena didn’t know the name, and she was sure there had never been any other healers, much less a personal one, designated for Luc alone.
Luc would never have consented to receiving anything that wasn’t equally distributed to all the rest of the Resistance, and that included medical care and healing. He’d struggled with having paladins sworn to protect him, despite it being a tradition older than Paladia.
Stroud had to be mistaken.
Yet there was something hidden, changed about her. A secret so painstakingly concealed, Helena could not even guess at what it was.
Her muscles cramped harder. She lay on the floor, her body curled and contorted inwards like a dead spider, but her mind raced on.
What would Luc do if he were the one still alive? Captive. He’d already have a plan. He would have charmed Grace into passing a message for him, begun coordinating a way to escape, and plotted to rescue everyone on the Outpost.
That’s what he would do. Now it was up to Helena.
She couldn’t fail him. Not again.
HELENA HAD EXPECTED THE TRANSFERENCE to begin immediately, but instead she spent what felt like days barely able to move as her muscles gradually un-cramped.
“Withdrawal,” Stroud said with a look of condescension as she forced a feeding tube down Helena’s nose and inserted a saline drip into her arm to keep her sedated. “No matter. I imagine they taught you to enjoy suffering. After all, sacrifice is a healer’s calling, isn’t it?”
Stroud was unveiled in her disdain for Helena with the revelation that they were both vivimancers, but on opposite sides in the war.
Stroud considered her a traitor.
“I don’t like those spasms,” Stroud later said during an examination, her mouth pursed when Helena’s fingers seized, making her drop a cup. “It’s not caused by the nullification set; do you remember when they began?”
Helena shook her head, flinching as the cold burning sensation of Stroud’s resonance sank into her left wrist, winding through the bones as she twisted and manipulated it for several minutes.
“From the condition of it, it appears you’ve broken this wrist several times. There’s old nerve damage. Do you remember when it happened?”
Helena had no recollection of ever seriously injuring her hands. Dexterous hands were vital for channelling and controlling resonance in both an alchemist’s practice and a healer’s work. She’d always been very careful with them.
“There wasn’t any mention of it in your student files, so it must have been during the war, but there’s no records there, either.”
Helena’s academic records had been unearthed, and Stroud liked to use them to interrogate her about the smaller details of her life. She suspected it was because Stroud was allowed to punish her for refusing to answer.
Where was her alchemy resonance first tested? At the Paladian embassy in her homeland, the southern islands of Etras. How old was she when she immigrated to Paladia to study at the Alchemy Institute? Ten.
